THE NINETIES

Tupac Shakur famously embraced the “thug life” of West Coast gangbangers, but his own background was rather more refined. He was born in New York to Black Panther parents, and he attended the esteemed Baltimore School for the Arts before moving with his family to the San Francisco Bay Area and joining the Digital Underground as a backup dancer.

In an exclusive interview with VF.com, Michael “Mike D” Diamond of the Beastie Boys says Shakur’s desire to be accepted as a “gangsta” may have contributed to his violent death in 1996: “He was so determined to be authentic, it ultimately killed him.”

Diamond goes on to describe the era’s unnerving rise of violence in hip-hop, most of it centered on four feuding figures: Shakur and Marion “Suge” Knight on the West Coast and Christopher “Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace and Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs on the East.

“First, there was security,” Diamond recalls, “then it was, like, you couldn’t have a hip-hop club without having a metal detector, to then, guns were kind of, like, everywhere, and you had to have a metal detector at the club, so at least people’s guns were in their cars and not inside the club.”

VF.com interviewed Diamond at length about his memories of the 1990s, which James Wolcott looks back on with mixed emotions in his column in Vanity Fair’s August issue. For Wolcott, “The 90s were the decade when the last tatters of privacy were torn aside, a national forest of woodies seemed to sprout up thanks to the rollout of a little blue pill called Viagra, reality TV unthroned soap opera as the medium’s queen of discord, and political theater lit up like a porno set.”

Not surprisingly, Diamond, whose pioneering hip-hop group soared through the decade on a wave of popular and critical success, takes a fonder view of the era. For him, it’s memorable for its great music, innovative videos, and D.I.Y. sensibility.

Come back tomorrow and Thursday for more from the interview. Tomorrow, Diamond muses on such 90s phenomena as grunge, zines, cannabis logos, and The Arsenio Hall Show. On Thursday, he’ll describe the making of the Beastie Boys’ famous “Sabotage” video, directed by Spike Jonze, and explain why the group’s 1989 album, Paul’s Boutique, didn’t catch on with audiences or critics until years after its release.